Melbourne takes centre stage

''WHAT HAPPENED before we had arts festivals in this country? What happened is, if you looked at the paper on a Saturday you would think 'what a boring dump this place is' and now you are spoilt for choice."

So says Leo Schofield, bon vivant of note (and infamy) and former director of various cultural festivals including those of Melbourne, Sydney and the Sydney Olympics.

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"One of the things festivals have done is make people more selective, much more judicious in their tastes. You have to be really original to stand out. It will no longer do to serve up the same theatre that made do in the 1960s," Schofield says.

But taste is a subjective notion and one man's eclectic and challenging artistic experience is another's pretentious piece of doddle. Perhaps the only thing that can be said with any certainty about Australia's metropolitan arts festivals is that they have enlivened (if not always advanced) debate about the role of the arts and culture in this country.

Views about what arts festivals should/shouldn't/could be abound. At one end are those who prefer their "culture" to be warm, fuzzy, entertaining, popular, free and preferably an amusing but harmless adjunct to a big sporting event; at the other end are the extreme culture fans, the risk- takers who want to be challenged, enlightened, educated and astonished by new developments in the contemporary arts.

These two groups tend also to be divided among those who believe that box-office takings are the most reliable measure of a festival's success, and those who argue that the cultural and social benefits that a festival brings cannot merely be tallied in dollars and cents.

Is it any wonder, then, that festival directors are so criticised? Their visions can be as idiosyncratic, and thus as irritating to some, as that of any artist - they cannot be all things to all people.

In Melbourne, baiting the artistic director has become a time-honoured sport come festival time, as much a part of the revelry as the arrival of lithe-limbed dancers and avant-garde artists from overseas, free outdoor shenanigans and the pitching of the spangly Spiegeltent on the Arts Centre forecourt.

In less than a fortnight the Melbourne International Arts Festival fires up for another year, but the critics of current artistic director Kristy Edmunds began firing up two months ago when she revealed this year's festival line-up. Cultural commentator Peter Craven dubbed it the "apotheosis of the fringe" while this paper's arts writer Robin Usher worried that Edmunds had strayed too far from the festival's "traditional mix". (In Adelaide, artistic director Christopher Hunt was criticised for his 1994 program because of its Asian theme - as one commentator put it, there was just too much soy sauce.)

Controversy seems to be perennially on the bill, and this is exactly as the Melbourne festival's founding fathers would have it.

When Melbourne launched its first arts festival 21 years ago - then known as the Spoleto Melbourne Festival, under the directorship of the Italian composer Gian Carlo Menotti - opera purists were aghast at controversial English director Ken Russell's interpretation of Madame Butterfly. Russell's bold and sensual version of the Puccini classic cast the heroine, Cio-Cio-San, as a prostitute during the Vietnam war. The opera featured nudity, ended with an atomic explosion, and vigorously commented on American imperialism (during the humming chorus Butterfly daydreamed of being a suburban mum, dispensing cornflakes and Coca-Cola).

The opera launched the festival, and on opening night some of the audience booed. But for many others, Russell's distinctive vision would remain an indelible experience.

For Paul Clarkson, who was the then head of the Victorian Ministry of Arts (later Arts Victoria), Russell's opera, and the controversy it created, was a sign that Melbourne had come of age.

"Melbourne had at last got a major international arts festival off the ground, one that would create the sort of controversy that such festivals should be willing to create," Clarkson writes in his history of the festival, Melbourne International Arts Festival, 1986-2005, The First 20 Years.

Provocation for provocation's sake will not sustain a festival. Melbourne's was also launched partly in response to the Adelaide Festival (founded in 1960) and to support multiculturalism, create jobs, develop Melbourne's international and national profile by emphasising the city's cosmopolitan nature, attract tourism, investment and productions of an artistically high standard.

So, 20 years on, how do we judge the influence of the Melbourne festival on the city's cultural life? For Bruce Gladwin, the artistic director of Geelong's renowned Back to Back Theatre, which features actors with intellectual disabilities, the value of the festival is undeniable. The festival, he says, has been crucial to broadening Back to Back's audience and giving the company exposure to overseas festival directors who have invited it to tour internationally. Back to Back has performed to public and critical acclaim at several Melbourne festivals, with 2002's production Soft and last year's Small Metal Objects.

"Being part of a festival, there is a whole new audience that comes to see your work,"Gladwin says.

In turn, Gladwin is inspired and influenced by overseas theatre companies such as Italian director Romeo Castellucci and his company Societas Raffaello Sanzio, which creates highly visual, non-narrative works and will present Tragedia Endogonidia at this year's festival.

"His work would never get here unless it was in the context of the festival," Gladwin says.

Robyn Archer, who has overseen Adelaide and Melbourne arts festivals, says festivals have introduced many artists and works to audiences who would otherwise not have had the opportunity to see them.

"(Festivals) have certainly helped create more sophisticated and demanding audiences in Australia. At the same time, the major festivals have been a tremendous support for Australian artists - there are now a long list of successful festival commissions for Australian artists and many of those commissions have gone on to huge international successes," Archer writes, via email from London.

But Melbourne theatre director Jean Pierre Mignon, who presented Moliere by Mikhail Bulgakov at the inaugural Melbourne festival, isn't so sure that the city's audiences have grown more discerning.

"You would think that some of the people who have been brought here, such as (Ariane) Mnouchkine (who presented the epic theatre piece about refugees, Le Dernier Caravanserail, with her company Theatre du Soleil at last year's festival), should make audiences crave greater quality and audacity, that is the theory, but is it true?"

He points to the recent Malthouse Theatre production El Dorado as evidence that Melburnians perhaps haven't become as sophisticated in their tastes as some might like to imagine.

"There should have been a queue around the block for that show," Mignon says. "But there wasn't."

Peter Craven, on the other hand, found Eldorado "excruciating" and argues that what the Melbourne festival should be doing is giving audiences access to what the city is most lacking - well-crafted plays.

"It's not as though we are getting some wonderful version of establishment theatre. It's not as if we are getting classic plays done terrifically well. I would be more interested in seeing (Sir) Ian McKellen perform or a new Stephen Sewell play than I would be in seeing a kind of mixed-form experimental theatre come dance and progressive jazz event."

The Melbourne International Arts Festival receives $5.5 million from the State Government and $400,000 from the City of Melbourne each year.

The festival's annual turnover is $8 million-$9 million, with the remainder of its budget comprising sponsorship, donations, money from foreign governments, and box-office takings of about $1 million a year.

On paper, Melbourne's box-office figures don't compare that favourably with the Sydney festival's, which makes about $3.5 million-$4 million a year in ticket sales, has an annual turnover of $13. 5 million and receives $3.3 million from the State Government and $1 million from the City of Sydney.

Leo Schofield, who is a great supporter of the Sydney Festival's incumbent artistic director, Fergus Linehan, says of the Irishman, "He's not afraid to be popular".

This year's Sydney festival line-up featured singer-songwriter Elvis Costello, a new work by leading theatre director Robert Lepage, and circus-theatre wunderkind James Thierree.

But the two festivals have very different objectives - Sydney's is unashamedly audience-driven, although not necessarily conventional, and Melbourne prides itself on its contemporary slant.

While graciously accepting Schofield's praises, Linehan says it is difficult to compare the festivals of Sydney and Melbourne. "This year we did a retrospective on Elvis Costello - it's just not fair to match that up against . . ."

Against Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto and Berlin-based multimedia artist Alva Noto, who are on the bill at this year's Melbourne fest?

"Exactly! Which is fantastic! In my opinion, Melbourne is much more driven by the general artistic ecology and the kind of footprint it leaves behind," says Linehan.

As for Edmunds, some of the responses she has had to her first festival sustains her amid the recent criticism of her programming.

"When someone asks me how do you withstand the criticism, I think of these somewhat random encounters where people I don't even know have come up to tell me that an artist's work gave them back something they hadn't realised they were losing. I would love the relief of knowing that absolutely every human being had been given something because of their discovery of an artist or an artistic expression that resonated in a meaningful way. But in the end, we have different tastes and different sensibilities.

"Call it fringe, call it established, call it outsider-urban, elite, esoteric, brilliant, beautiful, moving beyond words, call it alienating, sentimentalised, sold out, too this or too that, fluff or masterful. Call it whatever you believe it is, but do so once you've experienced it."

Gabriella Coslovich's picks

The Actor's Gang, George Orwell's 1984.

At a time when human rights, civil liberties and the rule of law are being eroded in the name of "freedom", the stage adaptation of Orwell's classic novel is a bold and provocative choice to launch the festival.

William Yang, Objects for Meditation

Sydney photographer William Yang uses 10 of his favourite household objects as springboards to telling stories about his life, his family, his friends. Yang's simple, candid tales are profoundly eloquent and quietly political.

insen, Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto

Japanese composer/pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto is revered by generations of electronic synth music fans. Don't hold it against them. Sakamoto performs with Berlin multimedia artist Alva Noto.